Blah

Sorry. I haven’t been in much of a mood this past week. Hell, maybe even these past two weeks.

Work has been chugging along, and I’ve been back and forth. Lately, it’s hard for me to tell if I’m being really social or if I’m being really reclusive. It feels like a mix. I guess that’s a good sign.

Work has, it seems, this uncanny ability to either make or break my day. I struggled with several pages I was working on, felt like I was working slowly, worked with Photoshop but felt like everything I made was absolute crap. Toward the end of the day, I got fairly frustrated, for no other reason than I didn’t feel like I was in control of my work, or more precisely: that I was producing very good work. That bugged me. And the feeling’s stayed.

Not a lot, but it’s still there, in the back of my head.

The Photoshop thing bugs me most of all. And it’s a silly thing, I know. What, I expect I’m supposed to somehow magically know this application and be able to make great things just by opening it up? It takes time, and practice, to become familiar with it. And I’ve rarely worked with it, extensively. So what did I expect? Of course it’s going to take me a long time, of course I’m not going to know how to do things. Difficulty at the beginning, and all that.

There’s a lot that I want to do, and when the day ends I look up and I want more hours. More than that, looking at this big list of things I want to do… it just doesn’t seem feasible in the time allotted. I talked with Juliet about this a few days ago, and I think I’m coming down with what was troubling her.

I’ve borrowed a book from Justin on databases and MySQL, I just cracked open the Actionscript Cookbook, I’ve got a dusty Photoshop book or two lying around that I need to methodically work through, I want to improve my HTML, I want to send out poems and get them published. The list seems too big, and the day too short.

I have some guilt over the blog as well. I’m worried I’m not providing enough interesting entries, not doing enough, not taking enough pictures. But technically, this place is my little venting grounds. You’re here only because I decided to leave the door open.

That’s kind of mean, now that I’m re-reading it.

On thinking about it more – the blog is precisely how I should be modelling my other goals. I have this list of things, and they all could take two hours, six hours, an entire day if I really decided I wanted to focus my enegies on, say, writing, or Photoshop.

But the catch is – there’s never those big hunks of time. There’s never those long stretches of 3-4 hours, where nothing else needs to be done. I learned this lesson in grad school, when I made writing the absolute first thing I did every single morning. And in that brief period of time where I adhered to that scheduled… hands down, the most productive point of my life, as far as writing goes.

The blog process: a little bit, every day. I had a writing instructor named Bill Roorbach (ahh! he’s got a web site!) who stressed the importance of writing every single day. He kept pushing that, class after class: every day. Even if you can’t write, and you can just read over what you’ve written, do it. Every day.

I need to schedule things, my studying, my writing, my play. I’m not talking about scheduling myself into some sort of rigid, monastic thing. I need something that will allow me to touch upon all those subjects I wish to learn, and to work (however briefly) on improving myself. Daily. Incrementally. Consistently.

I’ve been looking for the big blocks of time, the big stretches where I can really get to work. But that’s not the only way work gets done. I look at this blog, and I look at what a sweeping span of time it’s covered so far. A year and a half of my life is on here. That’s a lot.

But I didn’t enter everything in at once. I did it piece by piece, little by little, every single day. Sure some days I spent a lot of time updting (lots of pictures, lots of stories); but there were also brief days, the I-have-nothing days. Point being – they’re all there, and no matter if I spent an hour or a minute, I did it every day.

I suspect this weekend’s going to be a reflective one for me. I’m hoping I’ll think through a lot of what’s been troubling me, and figure out how I can best remedy that trouble.

We’re all busy. We all have things we want to do. Complaining may be theraputic, but it doesn’t help me accomplish too much beyond that. When I anguish out loud that I don’t have enough time, who am I kidding, to think that I’m somehow alone in this complaint? I say this like it’s some revelation, like it’s something only I have discovered.

"I want more time."

Every single person who’s ever lived has said that.